"For ne'er was a story of such wit" Nostalgic Tragicomedy in Chinese Romeo and Juliets

Sinophone Romeo and Juliet productions are predominantly tragicomic. That is to say that Shakespeare's original tragic tone is mitigated by a comical tone or a happy ending. This general trend is universal across production styles and geographic locations, indicating that the genre shift is motivated by a specific cultural experience. The frequency with which Chinese tragicomic productions of Romeo and Juliet address temporal dissonance suggests that a regional anxiety about the progression of time is central to the Sinophone reception of the text. The following four works have been selected as representations of tragicomic adaptation in four Chinese theatrical genres.: a 21st century Taiwanese pop song Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Liye, the 1988 Hong Kong screen adaptation Yi qi liang fu (One Husband Too Many), a Yunnan flower-lantern opera titled Zhuo Mei yu Ah Luo, and the Shakespearean spinoff Romeo & Zhu Yingtai. Each adaptation of the source text communicates a nostalgic experience of time; it is this nostalgic imagination that softens the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet and transforms it into a redemptive tragicomedy.